Canon EOS M Hacked by Magic Lantern, Firmware Boosts on the Way

Back in October, Roger Cicala shared some first impressions of the Canon EOS M with us, and stated that he believes the camera is “a firmware update and a price drop away from being a great camera.” While we haven’t seen any major price cuts to the camera so far, a firmware update may be on the near horizon.

By “update,” we mean “third-party firmware enhancement.” Magic Lantern has announced that its firmware add-on will indeed work with Canon’s mirrorless camera, and that they’ve begun the process of porting it.
The process started when Magic Lantern’s developers noticed that the tiny EOS-M shares quite a bit in common with the much larger 5D Mark III DSLR — at least inside “the brain.”

They were thus able to fiddle with a few things and dump the same firmware they’re developing for the Mark III onto the EOS M. The proof that it worked was the familiar message “Hello World!” printed onto the main LCD screen.

That’s obviously not a very helpful feature for photographers, but the team says that we should expect an initial alpha version of the EOS M Magic Lantern firmware to arrive sometime in the coming weeks.

Here’s what the developers have to say about the camera itself:

We like the EOS-M a lot, even if in our poll it came out near the bottom. With a few software tweaks, it can be a great small camera for timelapse and astronomy work, according to ubergizmo. The video side didn’t really impress us, but as a compact travel camera with DSLR image quality, it’s probably going to be hard to beat.